In ePD 2005.x pretty much every tool used the WDIR environment variable to find the needed files to do their thing. This was great because you could setup a "corporate" WDIR location and modify any *.ini files (or any other file for that matter) and the tools would find the corporate WDIR files before it found the files in the "standard" directory. Alas, in the new 2007.x versions of the tools (pick your flavor), this is not the case.

For instance when converting a design from 2005 to 2007, the convertor doesn't look at the WDIR variable, it just looks at the files in the "standard" directory. Another case is the pcbsystems.ini file. The DxDesigner Project &gt; Settings only looks at the file in the "standard" directory, not the one I've put in my corporate WDIR directory. I'm sure there are other cases.

There is a good reason to have the WDIR, it allows to modify the DxDesigner/EE environment without having to put files in the release sofware. I've got many users to support at locations all across the world. I'm not interested in having to modify each user's install of the tools to meet our environment needs.

This problem makes it very difficult to justify going to the 2007.x release. Is Mentor going to fix this and if so when?

I have seen similar behavior. However, not having been to 2005, I cannot compare. Do you have a list of specific files that exhibit this issue? I do know that, for instance, the Smartutilities break DXDesigner, and should only be added into the WDIR when you run Expedition. I suspect that DX either cannot handle more than 3 paths in WDIR, or it does not handle the sections in the scripts.ini file properly. On another tack, This suite sets WAY too many environmental variables (44), that mostly seem to do nothing. And don't forget to add the 25 additional variables to support analog simulation on top of the 44. They should either be built in to the tool, or placed in a common configuration file. This is, dare I say it, eXtreme?